Tuscany

Friday morning, 30 super cool JFRC students (7 guys- thanks loyola ratio) and our dean of students hoped on a bus and headed out to Tuscany. With visions of Under the Tuscan Sun in our heads, we were not to be disappointed. Our first stop was Tenuta Torciano, a family owned winery in the Chianti region. There, the owner himself proceeded to educate us naive American teenagers on the true skills of wine selecting, tasting, and respect. You must respect the wine in order for it to respect you back :-). So, I can now taste wine properly, with horribly unattractive mouth movements hand gestures and all. We also were treated to homemade traditional tuscan cusine: homemade lasagne (for the carnivores) and ribolita. Ribolita is kind of like tuscan stuffing, it is essentially old bread that is boiled with cabbage for hours, then mixed with vegetables and soaked in olive oil. Okay, it sounds really gross and the picture isn't too appealing either, but it tasted absolutely amazing!! And by the way the olive oil is the greatest in all of Italy. We tasted about six or seven wines, all with the Chianti classico guarentee. Fyi, any wine that is officially from the tuscan region must have a black rooster on the label, anything else, as he described, is pee pee.
After such a pleasant afternoon, we explored some towns along the road back to Siena, and just enjoyed luxurious driving through the wineries and olive groves. We also hit up some educational touring of course, this travel stuff is not all fun and games ;-).
The next morning we headed to tour a terracotta factory. A completely handcrafted business, we saw the dirt the clay came from, the pouring of tiles, the furnace, and some finished masterpieces. It takes a lot of skill, patience, talent, and money to produce those little red shingles you see on tuscan rooftops! For lunch we stopped in a small town with a market and wandered about for a couple hours just soaking in the enviroment. After, we headed to one of our Professor's friend's houses. Oh yeah, he lives in a castle! He and his wife had us up to their castle, which was once the last Florentinian fortress before Sienna territroy (Sienna and Florence have an age old rivalry). We sat on the terrace of the castle, with the most amazing view ever of the rolling hills of wineries and olive trees, and discussed history and had some good times for about four hours, while we ate some toasted bread soaked in tuscan olive oil, and drank dessert wine with almond biscotti. That is pretty much my favorite sentence ever! So you know after that we checked out some Etruscan tombs, and yet another town, and headed back for the night.
Our last day we explored Sienna itself. This is the most major town in the area. We got to exlore a lot about St. Catherine of Sienna, who just happens to be my confirmation namesake, so that was pretty neat. We saw where she lived, her shrine, and oh yeah- her head. Really could have done without that last one. Something about these italians, they love to save parts of dead people and display them. Then, more churches, museums, Michelangelos, 13th century alterpieces, and of course gelato. Oh yes, and we had to climb something, because that is just what you do in evey city, climb some damn tower to get to the breathtaking view. So we climbed the arch above Sienna. A great end to a fantastic trip!